HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter (HBR Guide Series)

by Harvard Business Review

“Keep the meeting as small as possible. No more than seven people.”

limiting it to four or five people is the only way to make sure every one has the chance to talk in a 60-minute meeting.

The challenge with large meetings isn’t just that everyone won’t have a chance to talk but that many of them won’t feel the need to.

“Ban devices.”

many people think they can multitask—finish an e-mail or read through their Twitter feed while listening to someone in a meeting. But research shows they really can’t.

“Keep it as short as possible—no longer than an hour.”

“Stand-up meetings are more productive.”

“Make sure everyone participates, and call on those who don’t.”

“just by asking people in the meeting for their opinion, you’re going to raise their commitment to the issues being discussed.”

“Never hold a meeting just to update people.”

“Always set an agenda ahead of time, and be clear about the purpose of the meeting.”

Meetings with just two people are actually conversations.

They aren’t weapons of mass interruption, and humans are naturally good at them. So keep conversations casual, and hold them as often as you’d like.

Management expert Peter Drucker famously noted that a “working meeting” was impossible: “One either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.” And, for the most part, he’s right. Most meetings involve planning and coordinating the work, not executing it. But sometimes people—writers, programmers, mathematicians— do huddle around a laptop or whiteboard to do real work together. Let’s call these group work sessions and make sure to disinvite the bureaucrats.

If you want people to be truly imaginative and express themselves, don’t dare call it a brainstorming meeting. Just call it a brainstorm.

Since these sessions are designed to maximize creativity, it’s a good idea to play a warm-up game, get people standing and active, and give people permission to have fun—free of judgment and criticism.

Rather than distributing a memo or having several one-on-one conversations, these bosses decide to save time by wasting the time of their colleagues, disrupting work, and corralling the team into a room together. These are convenience meetings and almost always a bad idea. They’re typically convenient for the individual and inconvenient for everyone else.

Meetings called as a matter of tradition or habit—formality meetings—should also be banned. These gatherings may have served a purpose at one time but do so no longer. Rather than considering an issue and asking “Is a meeting the best way to address it?” we treat the event as a given and ask “What issues do we need to address at this meeting?” This ensures we always find things to discuss, no matter how trivial they are.

Some meetings are called under the guise of collaboration or alignment when it’s really connection we’re after. These are social meetings. Connection is a laudable goal, but meetings are a pretty lousy way to foster it. Instead, invite people to a t...

It’s also helpful to distinguish between high-stakes, low-stakes, and no-stakes decision-supporting meetings. In a high-stakes meeting, you want to facilitate a real honest debate. Research shows that moderate task conflict leads to more accurate decisions, so demand candor from attendees, and encourage them to disagree.

When the decisions to be made are less consequential, the goal isn’t to slow down, it’s to speed up. Propose a plan for moving forward, and focus on generating buy-in. Of course you should allow for disagreement and be prepared to revise your plan if participants offer good reasons. But aim for quick resolution so you can spend most of the time coordinating implementation.

What do you want to have debated, decided, or discovered at the end of this session that you and the team haven’t already debated, decided, or discovered?

What do you want attendees to say when their team members ask, “What happened at the big meeting?”

Your first step when planning an important meeting should be to draft an initial set of goals based on the answers to the two questions above.

As a starting point, three to five short bullet points or sentences that articulate what you want to accomplish is more than enough.

Seek input from team members.

Select topics that are relevant to the entire team.

List agenda topics as questions the team needs to answer. Most agenda items are simply several words strung together to form a phrase, such as: “office space reallocation.” This leaves meeting participants wondering, “What about office space reallocation?” When you list a topic as a question (or questions) to be answered, it instead reads like this: “Under what conditions, if any, should we reallocate office space?”

Note whether the purpose of the topic is to share information, seek input for a decision, or make a decision.

Estimate a realistic amount of time for each topic.

Propose a process for addressing each agenda item.

The process for addressing an item should appear on the written agenda.

Specify how members should prepare for the meeting.

Identify who is responsible for leading each topic.

Make the first topic “review and modify agenda as needed.”

End the meeting with a plus delta evaluation. If your team meets regularly, two questions should form a simple continuous improvement process: What did we do well? and What do we want to do differently for the next meeting?

Outside general relationship-building, consider that a business meeting has only three functional purposes: To inform and bring people up to speed. To seek input from people. To ask for approval.

Get started right on time, no matter who isn’t there, and be bold and disciplined at keeping the conversation on track. Let go of anything that is less critical. Make decisions quickly, even if they are imperfect. Getting traction on a single thing is far more useful than touching on many issues without forward momentum on any.

The sign of a great meeting isn’t the meeting itself—it’s what happens after that meeting.

you’ll need these “get to the most critical point fast” skills—and the courage to use them— if you’re going to make the most of your time.

The shot clock is impersonal—even obnoxious—but that’s what makes it effective. It’s fair. Everyone is guaranteed to get a turn, and each issue is given the attention it needs. No one gets to “buy” extra floor time because of their status. It grants no wiggle room.

But for a meeting to be most useful, you have to have the right people—and only the right people—in the room. With too many attendees, you might have trouble focusing everyone’s time and attention and not accomplish anything; with too few, you might not have the right decision makers or information providers in the room.

How many people should you actually invite? There are no hard-and-fast rules, but in principle, a small meeting is best for deciding or accomplishing something, a medium-sized meeting is ideal for brainstorming, and a large meeting makes the most sense for communicating and rallying.

Set one key ground rule: Silence denotes agreement. These three words do a great job of forcing people to open up, no matter how reluctant they may be feeling (or how passive-aggressive they are). Explain to people that if they don’t say anything when given a proposal or plan, they’re voting “yes” for it. Silence doesn’t mean “I’m not voting” or “I reserve the right to weigh in later.” It means “I’m completely on board with what’s being discussed.”

At the start of your gathering, introduce the jellyfish ground rule: If any attendee feels the conversation is heading off course or delving into an inappropriate level of detail, they can and should employ the word to indicate that opinion. Simply say “jellyfish” or “I think we’re having a jellyfish moment” or “Gee, did I just see a jellyfish swim by?” It’s a catchall for “Why don’t you take this offline—the rest of us would like our meeting back.”

The key to successfully dealing with interrupters is to quash your frustration and instead “operate from a mind-set of curiosity,”

“Don’t get emotional” says White. “If you look threatened or angry, you will lose the trust of everyone in the room.” Rather, your goal should be to “react with humor, kindness, inclusion, and assertiveness.” Modulate your tone of voice and inflection, too. When you respond to the person who is interrupting, Schwarz says, “Speak in a genuinely curious, not frustrated, way.”

It’s not necessarily your goal to move through the meeting agenda as quickly as possible. Rather, he says, your aim is to “address issues efficiently, but also in a way that leads to a sustainable solution. When a colleague interrupts you with a comment you think is off topic, that’s not a fact; it’s an inference.” Ask your colleague to elaborate on his point.

When a colleague persists in interrupting, is off on a tangent, or keeps on making the same point over and over, be direct and firm, says White. She suggests saying something like “Rich, you’ve brought this issue up before, and we heard you. If you would like to stay after the meeting and talk with me, I’d be happy to discuss the matter further, but now we need to get back on track.”